Detroit Free Press Business Columnist

Henry Ford Innovation Center

A century after Henry Ford revolutionized auto manufacturing, an idea factory bearing his name is now starting to churn out a stream of new concepts and products designed to shake up the world of health care.

The Henry Ford Innovation Institute is an eclectic made-in-Detroit team of artists, scientists, even a former Hasbro toy designer, headed by a doctor renowned for his work with astronauts and Olympic athletes.

From a $1-million founding donation by William Clay Ford and his wife, Martha Ford, in 2011, funding for the nonprofit has since grown to $20 million, including $3 million from the estate of former Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson. That gift will soon be used to recruit up to 12 young innovation fellows who will focus on advances in digital health care.

Dr. Scott Dulchavsky, chairman of surgery at Henry Ford Hospital and CEO of the institute, was William Clay Ford’s personal physician for 10 years prior to the Detroit Lions owner’s death last month.

“One of our overarching goals is to become a driving force in our region and its economy,” Dulchavsky said last week, “so that in 10 years people in Silicon Valley are saying, ‘Hey, what the hell’s going on over in Detroit? Those guys seem to really be cracking.’ ”

The innovation center now has 17 employees in a retooled 1924 Albert Kahn building at the center of the Henry Ford Hospital complex in Detroit working on high-tech tools for robotic surgery and software for applications such as fitness tracking — and working on thorny problems like how to lower the readmission rates for patients once they leave the hospital

But the institute’s best-known innovation to date is decidedly low-tech: a hospital gown that provides more cover for a patient’s private parts while still allowing doctors and nurses easy access. Designed by Center for Creative Studies graduates — including Michael Forbes, who once worked at Hasbro — the gown got some national TV exposure last year.

“Leave it to Ford to cover your junk in your trunk,” comedian Ellen DeGeneres quipped in August when the gown was featured on her talk show. Other hospitals have expressed interest in the gown design.

“We don’t plan on making a gob of money on the gown. We might make a little bit, since we got some pop because it was on ‘Ellen’ and ‘Good Morning America,’ ” Dulchavsky said. If there’s a profit from the gown, some would go to CCS, a partner of the institute.

Indeed, it is partnerships with CCS, the Henry Ford museum complex and other nonmedical entities that can help transform smart health care-related ideas into product prototypes quickly.

“I think some of the most innovative solutions, in health care as well as other things, are when dissimilar people get together and talk about a common problem,” said Dulchavsky, who has worked with astronauts and Olympic athletes on ultrasound diagnostics.

The Henry Ford Health System, even prior to the institute, was among the top health care research outfits in Michigan, behind three large universities: Michigan State, Michigan and Wayne State.

So why spin off the innovation institute as a separate entity?

“Everybody talks about innovation, but most big places don’t have a simple, user-friendly way of taking an idea and vetting it,” Dulchavsky said. He and John Popovich, who had also treated Ford family members, talked often about the need to tackle that problem.

“We wanted to sort of codify this and say we are serious about innovation. It is in our DNA, since our founder, Henry Ford, was one of the biggest innovators in the history of humankind,” he said.

William Clay Ford was already a major donor to the hospital his grandfather had founded, having funded creation of the William Clay Ford Center for Athletic Medicine in 1996. When he offered a gift to get the innovation institute under way, Dulchavsky and Popovich enlisted the support of their bosses — health system CEO Nancy Schlichting and President Bob Riney — and got the system’s trustees to back the institute with $10 million.

Other donors have included Elena Ford, the Harvey S. Firestone Foundation, the Marvin and Betty Danto Family Foundation and the Elizabeth and Robert Plumleigh Foundation.

Jonathan Aaron, president of the William Davidson Foundation, said its recent pledge of three $1-million grants for the William Davidson Center for Entrepreneurship in Digital Health was something that fits perfectly with the philosophy of the late owner of the Pistons and Guardian industries. Davidson died in 2009.

“As a a successful entrepreneur, he valued innovative, out-of-the-box thinking,” Aaron said of Davidson. “And as we look at how we can make an impact in Detroit, it was a very easy grant for us to make and get excited about. It could be very transformative.”

Dulchavsky expects many of the Davidson fellows to come from southeast Michigan, but they need not be local — or from the health care industry.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a doc or a nurse or a health care worker,” he said. “It can be an engineer who has an interest in health care, or a programmer or a high school teacher. A lot of the best innovators never made it through college. I don’t need you writing papers. I need you innovating and coming up with novel ways to do things.”

David Egner, executive director of the New Economy Initiative for Southeastern Michigan, saw that potential right away.

“We can’t ignore the coming wave of health care technology; it’s going to be a major economic trend for the next 20 years,” he said. NEI has backed the institute with $2.7 million in grants and is considering more.

The total of $20 million in philanthropic funding to date “gives us enough runway for about a decade of operation, even without a blockbuster,” Dulchavsky said, referring to a commercial breakthrough that would provide a major royalty or licensing revenue stream.